Promoters - The False gods

I had a event promoter tell me that putting on events made them feel like a god, you got to make your own special creation that people worship.  They get excited about your event, they encourage others to get excited about it and hell they're willing to pay to attend your event.  Basically you're paid to throw parties, you get paid for it, you get popular and people love you, what's not to love!

It all gets to peoples heads at times in some sort of crazy god like syndrome which I've honestly seen many get too many promoters get carried away with, even the more famous and experienced promoters get too caught up into it at times.

After a while you can get into a position where you throw successful events and you think that every event you throw will demand worship and attendance but the reality is if you can't provide people won't be interested.  The Big Day Out was a perfect example of this, to pull of 20 years of festivals is an epic achievement and the recent line-up was considered sub-par and the worst seen in quite sometime.

Big Day Out made a huge mistake, in an age of social media where they had instant feedback from fans, saying that they weren't too happy with the direction they were going.  Big Day Out's response was that our line up was amazing and that people didn't give them enough credit for their line up choice in particular Kayne West, which they copped a lot of flack for.

This is one of the biggest problems I see in event promoting that people need reasons to go, that's why they're called promoters and they didn't give people good enough reasons to go and the picture on the right shows the end result in terms of the latest Big Day Out.  This is something that happens often with smaller event promoters, events need to be unique and different and need to get people excited about going to them, which I feel people seem to get a bit lazy with it worked last time.  Having a good name or track record definitely helps but at the end of the day people won't go to a bad event.

The other thing I've noticed is a need to be seen as invincible and that a show with few numbers is the worst thing in the world, ok, financially it is but promoters need to remember that it's better to put on a good show that few people attended, because at least they can tell their friends and grow the event, while the last thing I'd want to do is throw an event with lots of people which turns out to be really bad.  They think it's an insult to their promoting skills and their popularity, sometimes these things happen and it's good if you have a few hardcore fans out of an event, events don't need to be made for the masses but for massive enjoyment, if you're not doing this you shouldn't be putting on your own events.

I've noticed that people feel a need to cancel shows if the numbers are bad and to make up all sorts of excuses for their failures, that saying a "lack of numbers" is a sign of weakness or a bad event.  I honestly go against conventional wisdom and am happy to admit an event has poor numbers, an event has poor numbers and if I can't get a decent number of people I will lose money and can't afford to put that event on again.  By being honest with my crowd, people actually respect honesty and if it's a good idea people will encourage more of their friends to support the idea, they will actually tell me if I did something wrong or why people aren't interested, by being honest to my people, my people are honest to me, I can learn, improve and make bigger and better events in the future.

In comparison, I've seen all too often that promoters feel the need to make us excuses and my god it happens so much and they end up being such see through blatant lies.  This is not how you do things.  Promoters feel the need to cover up bad numbers and make up a reason to get out of putting on an event, it's horrible and disrespectful to the punters.  By giving people a reason, you've essentially telling people that your event is not worth going to because of a given reason, people lose respect for you to think that your event was all about one detail or factor, people won't tell you what went wrong, you won't learn how to improve.  Plus lets not forget, you're lying to your fans, you want people to trust that you're putting on a good event, how are people going to trust you if you've lied to them?

Overall these things need to stop, this is 2012, we are all connected through our Facebook's and event promoters have more tools than ever to get feedback for their events.  Promoters need to learn to see this as an advantage and treat this with respect and understand that people have their needs.  Feeling the need to feed to your god like worship is one thing but please remember, put you fans first, don't treat them like idiots and actually listen to them and give them what they want.